During the time that the RSA patent was in force, DSA was the signature algorithm of choice for any software that didn't want to deal with patent licenses. (Which is why lots of old PGP keys are still DSA.) It has slowly disappeared since the patent expired and it appears that 4096-bit RSA is now the algorithm of choice if you're on the run from the NSA [1]. (And if you're a journalist trying to get a reply: keyid BDA0DF3C.)

But DSA can also be used with elliptic curves in the form of ECDSA and, in that form, it's likely that we'll see it return in the future, at least to some extent. SSH and GPG both support ECDSA now and CAs are starting to offer ECDSA certificates for HTTPS.

Unfortunately, DSA has an important weakness that RSA doesn't: an entropy failure leaks your private key. If you used a machine affected by the Debian entropy bug then, in that time, messages that you encrypted with RSA can be broken. But if you signed anything with a DSA key, then your private key is compromised.

The randomness in DSA is absolutely critical. Given enough signatures, leaking just a handful bits per signature is sufficient to break it. In the limit, you can make the make the mistake that Sony did and not understand that the random number needs to be generated for each message and, seemingly, just pick one and code it in. (See XKCD.)

But it doesn't need to be this way! All that is required of the nonce is that it be unique for each distinct message and secret, and we can achieve that by hashing the message and private key together. That's what Ed25519 does and I've added the option to OpenSSL to do the same. Unlike RSA and Ed25519 signatures, DSA signatures are probabilistic - signing the same message twice with the same key will result in different signatures. Since someone may be depending on that, OpenSSL also hashes in some randomness to maintain that feature.

(p.s. if you're an actual cryptographer, please take a look at the core of the code and let me know if I'm an idiot.)

Since the DSA specification says that the nonce must be randomly generated, and compliance with the spec is important for many users, this isn't enabled by default. For ECDSA keys, one needs to call EC_KEY_set_nonce_from_hash, for example. But hopefully we can measurably improve things with little effort by doing this.

Appendix

Here's an example of breaking DSA with a known nonce: essentially the Sony PlayStation hack. I've used the variable names from the Wikipedia page for those that want to follow along, although I'm not using a subgroup to keep things simple.

Next, generate a key pair. x is the private key and y is the public key:

x = int(F.random_element()) % n
y = g^x
(x, y)
(1282, 966)

Generate our nonce, which will be fixed for two different messages in this example:

k = int(F.random_element()) % n
kInv = inverse_mod(k, n)

The first message that we sign will be 42 and the pair (r, s) is the signature. (Normally the message would be a hash of a much larger message.) The signature is very simple: r is gk and s is (m + xr)/k:

Next, we also sign the message 24 (which I'll call mm) and we gather the two signatures. We have s and ss, both with the same r. Since s = (m + xr)/k, we can subtract the two to get (m + xr - mm - xr)/k, which is just (m - mm)/k. Thus k = (m - mm)/(s - ss). Given k, we can rearrange the original equation for s: s = (m + xr)/k ⇒ sk = m + xr ⇒ sk - m = xr ⇒ (sk - m)/r = x. And thus we have the private key: